FBI Plane Over City One of Many Reasons for Concern

By: Mike Leonard

Most people seemed to find humor in the news that a single-engine FBI Cessna was flying reconnaissance missions over Bloomington last week.

Was it really just basketball coach Mike Davis, looking for the team he put on the floor in November?

Was it Bud and Amy Bernitt, looking for Democrat officeholders who might be drinking and driving?

Maybe it was simply a routine surveillance mission aimed at counting cop cars and finding the best doughnut shop in town.

After all, the FBI said the plane carried no electronic surveillance equipment and its occupants were merely eyeballing the landscape below.

How effective could that possibly be?

Of course, this explanation comes from a wing of a federal government that announced it planned to lie and plant disinformation stories in the war on terrorism. The same government that then backtracked and said it wasn't going to do that - immediately raising the question: "Are they lying now?"

In truth, American citizens have every reason to view strange phenomena with a watchful eye. Foreign students at Indiana University, particularly from Middle Eastern countries, are being approached and interviewed by FBI agents, not for probable cause but because of their country of origin.

Groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the ultra-conservative Eagle Union are protesting in the strongest terms a proposal coming from Attorney General John Ashcroft's office to erase even more civil liberties and constitutional protections than were hatcheted by the ill-considered and hastily-passed USA Patriot Act.

Included in "Patriot II" is a proposal to legalize the secret arrest and detention of "suspected terrorists" with no obligation to tell anyone who is being held, why or where.

Another provision would allow the government to strip any American of citizenship if he or she "becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a terrorist organization". Imagine if this provision had been in place during the 1960's. Given J. Edgar Hoover's opinion of Martin Luther King Jr., you could have been stripped of citizenship for supporting King and numerous civil rights organizations.

There's more, so much more that the Eagle Forum's legislative director describes Ashcroft's plan as, essentially, "tagging and tracking the average American citizen".

Certainly, the Bush administration recognizes no boundaries in its frightening willingness to trample not only constitutional rights but the canons of civilized diplomatic behavior. Last Sunday, the Observer in London reported on its receipt of an apparently authentic National Security Agency memo directing U.S. agents to intercept phone calls and e-mails to spy on United Nations Security Council members and learn what they're thinking and how they might vote on a new resolution to approve a U.S.-led war on Iraq.

What the Observer calls a "dirty tricks" campaign comes on the heels of U.S. bribes to win votes and threats of economic repercussions against countries that don't vote with the U.S. on Iraq. "Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign, with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery", the Observer reported. "The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations."

So if the U.S. government under President Bush is willing to spy on its colleagues within the U.N. and strip its citizens of citizenship for merely speaking with anyone believed - not proven - to be a terrorist, anything is possible.

That FBI plane could have been doing anything in its low-level flights over Bloomington. Our predilection to laugh off such oddities shows how much we've been lulled into a dangerous complacence.

It's time to recall the famous words of Lord Acton, who wrote in his 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."